“When she went into ‘Willow, Weep for Me,’ you wept. You looked about and saw that the few other customers were also crying in their beer and shot glasses. Nor were they that drunk. Something was still there, that something that distinguishes an artist from a performer: the revealing of self. Here I be. Not for long, but here I be. In sensing her mortality, we sensed our own.”
Studs Terkel
more infosource: describing Billie Holiday, in Talking to Myself: A Memoir of My Times (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), 226.
buy on Amazon
category: Billie Holiday, mortality, music, performer, self, singer
medium: Memoir
via: The Writer's Almanac“Death: We will all have it. In a century this distance between him and me will be nothing.”
Anne Morrow Lindbergh
more infosource: Locked Rooms and Open Doors: Diaries and Letters of Anne Morrow Lindbergh 1933–1935 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974), 13.
buy on Amazon
view on Google Books
category: death, grief, human condition, mortality, mourning
medium: diary
notes: diary entry dated Monday, January 30, 1933; Anne and Charles Lindbergh's son Charles Augustus Lindbergh, Jr. was kidnapped on the evening of March 1, 1932 at the age of twenty months
“We like lists because we don’t want to die.”
Umberto Eco
more infosource: “Interview with Umberto Eco,” SPIEGEL, by Susanne Beyer and Lothar Gorris, November 11, 2009.
view online
category: death, list, mortality
medium: interview
via: panopticist
mortality